Category Archives: Judaism

Chabad Caught In a Thicket

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There are Jews who keep their heads down. And then there is Chabad.

From Bondi Beach to Mumbai, from Barcelona to American college campuses, Chabad does the opposite of what fear would counsel. It does not retreat inward. It goes outward—publicly, cheerfully, stubbornly—lighting candles, setting tables, opening doors.

And for that, it bleeds.

In Australia, Chabad helped organize a large public Chanukah gathering near Bondi Beach—sun, music, children, light. A Jewish holiday celebrated exactly as it was meant to be: openly, without apology. Antisemites came – because, as they say of bank robbers robbing banks – that’s where the Jews are. Violence came to eradicate the joy.

In India, Chabad paid an even heavier price. During the 2008 Mumbai attacks, terrorists deliberately sought out the Chabad House. This was not collateral damage in a geopolitical struggle between India and Pakistan. It was targeted slaughter. The rabbi and his wife were tortured and murdered because they were Jews—and because they were visible Jews, serving other Jews. The attackers bypassed many targets to reach them. They knew exactly who they were looking for.

This pattern repeats itself with chilling consistency. Chabad emissaries—shluchim—are not anonymous. They live openly as Jews in places where Jews are few, where governments barely register their presence, let alone prioritize their safety. Some countries have only dozens of Jews. Some have none at all, except for Chabad.

And still Chabad goes.

On Friday nights in Barcelona, Jewish life gathers around Chabad tables. Tourists, locals, students—many unaffiliated, many unsure—find Judaism not as a political identity or an abstract cause, but as food, song, wine, warmth. As Shabbat.

On university campuses across North America, Chabad events now regularly outshine Hillel. This is not accidental. Where Hillel has often drifted toward “wokeness,” flattening Judaism into a vague social-justice aesthetic, Chabad offers something older and sturdier: tradition without embarrassment. Commandments without footnotes. Jewish joy without ideological permission slips.

That, too, draws attention. And danger.

Chabad rabbis and their families know they wear a mark, and not metaphorically. They live without anonymity. They publish their addresses. They welcome strangers. They light menorahs in public squares at a moment in history when public Jewishness has been recast as a provocation.

Chabad lighting “the largest menorah” on the sixth night of Chanukah in Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza in 2017 (photo: First One Through)

Chanukah, of all holidays, insists on this. It is not meant to be hidden. The lights are placed in windows, at doorways, facing the street. Pirsumei nisa—publicizing the miracle—is the law. Chabad takes it seriously, even when the risk feels immediate.

In a world where Jew-hatred has resurged with startling comfort, Chabad has become something else as well: exposed in the spotlight.

There is an old biblical image for this.

When Abraham is told to sacrifice Isaac, the knife is raised but the sacrifice is halted. Instead, a ram appears, caught in a thicket by its horns. The ram is offered in Isaac’s place.

Chabad, today, feels like that ram.

Silhouette of two Chabad men at a Chankah lighting ceremony on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, shortly after the massacre of Jews in Bondi Beach, Australia in December 2025. Just a few hundred feet away sits Gracie Mansion, soon-to-be home of New York City’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who refuses to repudiate the phrase “Globalize the Intifada,” a call to kill diaspora Jews. (photo: First One Through)

Not because Chabad seeks martyrdom—it emphatically does not. It absorbs the blows meant for Jewish visibility itself. It becomes the target because it brings together Jews to celebrate Judaism with gladness – the ultimate point of inflammation for antisemites.

The world often says it wants Jews to be “normal.” Chabad refuses that bargain. It insists on being Jewish instead—fully, visibly, joyfully—even when the cost is high.

Chabad is not actually caught in a thicket; it takes its position openly. But antisemites hear a calling that is not divine but grotesque when they see joyful Jews, and are willing to sacrifice themselves and their sons – like the murderers of Bondi Beach – to feed the poisoned passion.

Stop With the Hanukkah Miracle and Declare the Hanukkah MESSAGE

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The Book of the Maccabees lays out that the war against the Jews did not start with violence but with policy. The Syrian-Greeks initiated the battle by denying Jews their right to religious practice. Jewish life was made illegal through decrees and prohibitions, through the quiet insistence that Jews no longer have standing in their own holiest spaces.

The Temple Mount was seized. Jewish worship was banned. Foreign rites were imposed in its place. The text is precise and unsparing:

“And forbid burnt offerings, and sacrifice, and drink offerings, in the temple; and that they should profane the sabbaths and festival days…. They set up the abomination of desolation upon the altar, and built idol altars throughout the cities of Juda on every side.”
—1 Maccabees 1:45, 1 Maccabees 1:54

When the Maccabees returned to Jerusalem, the devastation they witnessed was total. The enemies of the Jews intended humiliation. A holy place was turned into a ruin so complete that nature itself began to reclaim it.

“They saw the sanctuary desolate, the altar profaned, and the gates burned. In the courts shrubs had grown up as in a forest.”
— 1 Maccabees 4:38

Judas and his brothers refuse to accept erasure as permanent and took action:

“Then Judas and his brothers said: ‘Behold, our enemies are crushed. Let us go up to cleanse the sanctuary and dedicate it…. They tore down the altar and stored the stones in a suitable place on the temple hill until a prophet should come to tell what to do with them.”
— 1 Maccabees 4:36, 44–46
“They purified the sanctuary and made another altar of sacrifice… and offered burnt offerings according to the law….They celebrated the dedication of the altar for eight days, and offered burnt offerings with gladness.“
— 1 Maccabees 4:48–56

And then memory was mandated.

“Judas and his brethren with the whole congregation of Israel ordained, that the days of the dedication of the altar should be kept in their season from year to year by the space of eight days, from the five and twentieth day of the month Casleu, with mirth and gladness.”
— 1 Maccabees 4:59

Why legislate remembrance? Why must it be done with joy?

Because danger does not end with victory nor complacency. The danger is forgetting how erasure begins—how denial of access precedes denial of life. Enemies rarely announce extermination at the start. They begin by declaring Jews illegitimate, unworthy of presence, unfit to practice their own traditions.

Guard blocks entry of a Jewish man onto the Jewish Temple Mount at the Cotton Merchant’s Gate, because he is a Jew, in November 2025. (Photo: First One Through)

The Maccabees understood something timeless: when Jews accept exclusion as normal, the battle has already been lost. When they are told to make do with less than basic human rights demand, they can never really have a full heart.

Hanukkah is the refusal to let others define Jewish legitimacy. It is the insistence that Jewish rights—to worship, to gather, to exist openly—are not privileges granted by empires or overseers, but as the opening lines of America’s Declaration of Independence state, “endowed by their Creator.”

So it was in their days. So it is in ours.

Joseph, Yusuf and the Stories We Tell

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The story of Joseph is the longest sustained personal narrative in the Bible. It is a life told end-to-end—youth and jealousy, betrayal and exile, moral clarity under pressure, reversal of fortune, and reconciliation. Jews have lived inside this story for millennia and drawn from it lessons about love misdirected, loyalty earned, leadership forged, and fate revealed only in retrospect.

It begins, uncomfortably, at home.

Jacob’s overemphasis on Joseph—his public favoritism, symbolized by the coat of many colors—fractured the family. It was not Joseph’s dreams alone that enraged his brothers, but the hierarchy their father imposed. Love, unevenly expressed, curdled into resentment. That resentment escalated to violence. The brothers nearly killed Joseph, then sold him into slavery, persuading themselves that exile was mercy.

And yet, the terror of the pit became the opening move in a larger design. Joseph’s descent—into slavery, into prison, into obscurity—ultimately saved thousands from starvation, including the very brothers who betrayed him. The Torah insists on an uncomfortable truth: human cruelty can coexist with divine purpose, without being excused by it.

Over time, the transformation that matters most occurs not in Joseph, but in Judah. The brother who once proposed selling Joseph later rises to moral leadership. Faced with the potential loss of Benjamin, Judah offers himself instead. Ultimatelty, kingship does not emerge from brilliance or dreams, but from responsibility and loyalty. Judah learns what Jacob failed to teach early: leadership is love with a wide visual field.

But this is not the only Joseph story in the world.

Yusuf and Zulaykha: A Different Emphasis

In Islamic tradition, Joseph is Yusuf, and his story unfolds with different texture and purpose. The Qur’an (Surah Yusuf) adds layers absent from the biblical text. Where the Bible does not even name Potiphar’s wife, Islamic tradition gives her a name—Zulaykha—and an entire inner life.

Her attraction to Yusuf begins as physical longing, but in later tradition becomes a spiritual ascent. Love itself is refined—from desire for beauty to yearning for the divine. This is not biography alone; it is allegory.

Persian culture preserved these layers visually, through extraordinary manuscript art that does not merely illustrate scripture but interprets it.

One remarkable manuscript—now on display at the Grolier Club from the collection of the Jewish Theological Seminary (until December 27, 2025)—shows Joseph cast into a well. The details are arresting. Joseph has lost not only his coat of many colors, but his hat and shoes as well—status stripped away piece by piece. The brothers even drop rocks down on him.

Story of Yusuf and Zulaykha from Mashhad, Iran in 1853 by the Jewish scribe Eliyahu ben Nisan ben Eliyahu Gorgi. Digitized entire manuscript can be viewed here

One figure stands apart in the drawing. At the bottom of the scene, a brother sits almost contemplatively. His hands alone are painted with henna, marking higher status. He smokes a long çubuk (copoq)—a dry-tobacco pipe, not the classic Persian water-based hookah—an unsettling detail as Joseph languishes in a dry well below. The image quietly foreshadows hierarchy, survival, and reversal. Even in betrayal, the future is being seeded. This must be Judah, on the side of the well with his five brothers from mother Leah, who is destined to help Joseph out of the pit and rise to fame himself.

One brother seems to connect at the same level of Joseph – at a low point in this story but will rise to fame later in life: Judah

Other images in the Yusuf cycle go further still in the manuscript. Women cut themselves upon seeing Joseph’s beauty (image 70 from Surah Yusuf 12:31). Zulaykha is said to lose her sight from longing for him (image 128). Beauty becomes dangerous, overwhelming, transformative. The Islamic tradition does not deny desire; it seeks to discipline and redirect it.

Zulaykha losing her sight at the end of the story is one of the versions transmitted through the ages

Two Traditions, One Origin

For Jews, Joseph’s story is about dreams and reversals, exile and return, family rupture and national survival. For Muslims, Yusuf’s story adds a meditation on beauty, temptation, and love’s ascent toward God. The Islamic telling emerged nearly two thousand years after the Jewish forefather lived. It is not wrong; it is different.

What matters for us today is that these differences did not need to fight. The stories coexist without trampling on the other.

The same characters—Jacob, Joseph, the brothers—carried distinct lessons without cancelling one another. No one is frozen forever as a villain. Jacob loved poorly but learned. The brothers failed catastrophically but changed. Judah rose. Sacred storytelling, at its best, refuses to eternalize blame.

That restraint is precisely what feels absent today.

Stories, Power, and the Present

The Holy Land, sacred to both Jews and Muslims, is no longer widely treated as a shared inheritance, but as a zero-sum possession. Hamas openly declares that Jews will be wiped out. Clerics in parts of the Islamic world speak in timelines of Jewish disappearance due to their being “enemies of world peace.” This is not interpretation; it is incitement. It rejects the Joseph model, in which history bends—slowly and painfully—toward survival, accountability, and reconciliation rather than annihilation.

And yet, Islamic civilization itself offers another precedent. Islam historically made room for Jewish continuity—absorbing biblical figures, preserving Jewish prophets, and allowing traditions to dovetail rather than collide. Yusuf did not replace Joseph; he walked alongside him. Zulaykha did not negate Potiphar’s wife; she deepened the moral inquiry. Reverence did not require negation.

That capacity still exists.

If Joseph teaches anything durable, it is that sovereignty, survival, and holiness are not insults to one another. Jews returning to and governing their homeland need not be read as a theological defeat for Islam. They can be understood, instead, as another chapter in a long, shared story—one that does not deny difference, but refuses extermination as destiny.

The question is whether we choose that inheritance again.

Collective Responsibility From Dinah in Shechem to the Hostages in Gaza

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When Shechem raped Dinah in Genesis 34, the Torah condemns not only the man who violated her but the entire city that allowed her to remain captive. Dinah was held openly in Shechem’s home, and no one objected. Not one elder confronted the crime. Not one resident demanded her release. Their silence became their guilt.

This is the Torah’s principle: A society that tolerates the humiliation of the innocent becomes responsible for it.

October 7 Made That Principle Contemporary

The political-terrorist group Hamas did not merely murder and rape on October 7, 2023. They dragged 251 human beings—children, women, men, elderly—into Gaza. For months, those hostages were kept in houses, apartments, tunnels beneath family homes, mosques, and clinics. People fed their captors. People guarded entrances. Crowds celebrated the kidnappings. The captivity was not hidden from the population; it was woven into daily life.

Crowds of Gazans celebrate the taking of captives – alive and dead – on October 7, 2023

And just as in Shechem, no one in Gaza intervened. Not one hostage was smuggled out. Not one family risked itself to free a stranger. Not one community leader demanded their return.

The Torah would not call this ignorance. It would call it complicity.

Dinah’s City and Gaza: A Shared Moral Failure

Shechem’s offense was personal; the city’s offense was communal. The same moral structure applies today: the crime begins with Hamas, but it enlarges to those who shelter, celebrate, or simply accept the captivity of innocents. The vast majority of Gazans supported Hamas’s actions.

Jacob criticized Shimon and Levi for endangering the family, but the Torah never suggests that the men of Shechem were innocent. Their passivity was enough to implicate them. When God protects Jacob’s family afterward, it signals that defending dignity—even forcefully—was morally justified.

The Torah’s Message for Our Generation

The world tries to draw a sharp line between Hamas and “the people of Gaza,” as though collective moral responsibility vanished in modern times, and the celebrated terrorism is not inherently a collective attack on an entire society. Dinah’s story rejects these illusions. It teaches that a society that houses kidnapped people is not neutral, and a population that normalizes and endorses cruelty shares responsibility for it.

Jacob scolded his sons Shimon and Levi for carrying out the revenge attack against Shechem’s people, and said that it would make their family a pariah. That too is repeating today, as many countries condemn and isolate the State of Israel for its actions in Gaza.

Dinah’s captivity was a test of Shechem’s moral fabric, and it failed. The captivity of Israeli hostages – for years – was a test of Gaza’s, and it also failed. The anger over the slaughter of the guilty has also left a deep mark then and today.

The lesson is simple and ancient: When a people accepts atrocity in its midst, the stain becomes communal. But it will not leave leave the actors in the just war untarnished in the days and years ahead.


Intent and Action: Jacob, Cain, and the Burning Question of Worthy Offerings

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From the earliest chapters of the Hebrew Bible, we encounter a recurring theme: human beings trying to reach God through offerings. Noah offers thanks after the flood (Genesis 8:20–21). Abraham builds altars wherever he senses God’s presence (Genesis 12:7–8, 13:18). And in the first tragic sibling story, Cain and Abel each bring a gift to God—hoping to be seen, heard, loved (Genesis 4:3–5).

The Torah gives us the parameters of worthiness: a true offering rises.

Abel’s gift from the firstlings of his flock is accepted—traditionally understood as being consumed in heavenly fire (Genesis 4:4). It ascends upward like smoke from a perfectly tended sacrifice. Cain’s offering—of lesser quality—remains inert. No ascent. No connection. It is not merely ignored; it is a theological dead end, carrying the terror that one’s prayers may not only go unanswered, but may reflect back one’s own internal inadequacy.

That anxiety, that existential dread, echoes generations later across the Parshas of  Toldot and VaYeytze.

Isaac’s Consuming Blessing

Jacob, urged by his mother, disguises himself as Esau in an elaborate plan to secure Isaac’s blessing (Genesis 27:6–29). Isaac eats the carefully prepared meal and, in a moment echoing the sacrificial imagery of Cain and Abel, pours out a blessing so full that when Esau arrives moments later, Isaac declares he has nothing left (Genesis 27:33–36). It was an all-consuming offering. Nothing remains.

Esau’s reaction mirrors Cain’s ancient rage. Spurned, overshadowed, convinced the divine pipeline has bypassed him, Esau vows murder (Genesis 27:41). The pattern repeats: the rejected one turns violent against the brother whose offering has “risen.”

Jacob’s Panic: A Blessing Built on Lies?

And so Jacob flees at his mother’s urging – that same person who had directed him deceive his father. Jacob runs both from Esau’s wrath and from the unbearable question gnawing at his soul (Genesis 27:42–45).

Was his mother’s plan a failure?
Did he truly deserve his father’s blessing?
Was it legitimate if it was obtained through deception?
Was he the new Abel—accepted and uplifted—or Cain, offering something that looked fine on the outside but was internally rotten?

Jacob had already exploited Esau’s hunger to purchase the birthright (Genesis 25:29–34), then deceived his own blind father to secure the blessing (Genesis 27:15–23). He must have wondered whether the blessings he secured, built on trickery, would end like an unburnt sacrifice—never rising, never accepted, destined to collapse under their own falsehood. Perhaps this moment was not a perfect echo of the sacrifices to God by Cain, but marked by the intentions and actions between people, with the uncertainties and fragility such interactions forever carry.

Was Isaac’s blessing a dead letter?

The Ladder: When Heaven Answers the Question

Then comes the dream at Bethel.

A ladder planted on earth, its top reaching into the heavens, with angels ascending and descending (Genesis 28:12). A strange image on its face. Many divine characters at a single time and place, moving in remarkable choreography.

The angels rising—those are the offerings, the intentions, the gifts Jacob has made, confused and imperfect though they may be. They ascend like the smoke of Abel’s sacrifice. And the very same angels descend—carrying blessing back down. Not new angels. The same ones. The same act, the same intention, returning in kind.

This is the divine reply Jacob so desperately needed:
Your offering was accepted. Your intent was seen. Your blessing stands.

Marc Chagall’s Jacob’s Ladder (1973)

Jacob Wakes with Calm

Jacob awakens transformed: relieved, inspired, grounded (Genesis 28:16–17). He WAS afraid. No longer. He understands the dream not as a prophecy of future events but as confirmation that his past actions—flawed in execution but upright in intention—had been received as a worthy offering.

So Jacob does what his ancestors always did in moments of divine clarity: he offers something back to God, establishing that site as sacred and vowing a vow of service and eternal charity (Genesis 28:18–22).

The Lesson: Intent Rises

The Torah’s message from Cain to Jacob is not that action is irrelevant. Far from it. But action without intention is inert—like Cain’s cold, unrisen offering. Intention, even wrapped in human imperfection, can ascend and draw God’s response.

Jacob’s ladder teaches that what rises from the heart returns as blessing. The smoke goes up; the angels come down. The offering is accepted; the blessing is confirmed.

Intent and action. Purity and performance.
That is the spiritual physics the Torah reveals—first in a field with two brothers, and then on a lonely night with a frightened man who finally learns he is worthy.

A Name That Never Changes

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In Parshat Toldot, as the last of the forefathers is birthed and named, we are reminded that Isaac stands out for a quiet but powerful distinction. He is the only one of the forefathers whose name was never changed.

Abram became Abraham.
Jacob became Israel.

But Isaac remains Isaac — Yitzchak — from the moment God speaks his name before he is even conceived. His existence, his identity, and his destiny are declared in advance. Not earned, not negotiated, not revised.

God tells Abraham that Sarah will have a son in her old age (Genesis 17:19), and when he laughs at the impossibility of it, that laughter becomes his name. His very being is rooted in divine certainty: what looks impossible to humans is already written by God. Isaac’s name is fixed because the promise is fixed.

And so it is with the Land of Israel.

Israel is the only nation on earth whose name predates its people’s return, their sovereignty, their wars, their exiles, and their rebirth. The name was carved into Tanach, inscribed into prayer, whispered by exiles across continents, and sustained through millennia when Jews had no army, no state, no power — only a promise. [see more below]

The Romans tried to erase it, renaming Judea as Palestina to sever Jewish memory from Jewish land. Empires rose and fell, borders shifted, conquerors rewrote maps. But the name Israel endured, unchanged — the national parallel to Isaac himself. A people and a land whose identity was not invented but inherited, not imposed but foretold.

Just as Isaac’s name was spoken before his birth, the name “Eretz Yisrael” was spoken long before the modern state emerged. A name older than Rome, older than Islam, older than every foreign flag that temporarily claimed the soil. A name that outlived exile and humiliation, the Crusades and expulsions, pogroms and partitions.

You can conquer a territory.
You can redraw borders.
You can rename provinces.

But you cannot undo a promise.

The modern State of Israel is often framed as a political accident — a product of diplomacy, war, and the ashes of Europe. But its name tells a different truth. Like Isaac, its identity was scripted long before any diplomat voted or any soldier fought. It is not a modern label but an ancient declaration returning to life.

And Isaac’s life – the longest of all of the forefathers at 180 years – was only spent in Eretz Yisrael. While Abraham and Jacob both spent years outside, God told Isaac (Genesis 26:2) to not leave the land, even during famine. His presence, like his name, is fixed forever.

The world can debate policies, borders, governments. But the essence — the name — does not change. Isaac never needed a new one. And neither does Israel.

Young boy praying at the Kotel in the Old City of Jerusalem, Israel (photo: First One Through)

Eretz Yisrael, The Land of Israel

Biblical Origins
The phrase Eretz Yisrael (ארץ ישראל) already appears in Tanakh:
• Shmuel I 13:19 – “No blacksmith could be found in Eretz Yisrael.”
• Melachim II 5:4 – Naaman’s Israelite maid and the cessation of Aramean raids reference Eretz Yisrael.
• Yechezkel 40:2; 47:18 – Ezekiel is shown visions “in the Land of Israel.”
• Divrei HaYamim I 22:2; II 2:16; 34:7 – Solomon’s labor and Josiah’s reforms occur “throughout Eretz Yisrael.”

These uses establish the term over 2,500 years ago, well before the Roman exile.

Early Rabbinic Usage — Mishnah
The term becomes a formal halakhic category in the Mishnah:
• Kelim 1:6 – “Eretz Yisrael is holier than all other lands,” the base level of the Ten Sanctities.

This is 2nd century CE — already treating Eretz Yisrael as a fixed legal reality.

Dead Sea Scroll known as 4QMMT (estimated written in 150BCE) is a halachic letter that refers to “Eretz Yisrael”

Talmudic Centrality
The Talmud Bavli expands the spiritual meaning:
• Ketubot 110b – “Whoever dwells in Eretz Yisrael is as one who has a God; outside it, as one who has none.”
• Ketubot 111a – “Whoever lives in Eretz Yisrael dwells without sin.”

These sugyot codify the land’s religious centrality, not just its geography.

Halakhic Midrash — Sifrei
The Sifrei on Devarim states:
• “Dwelling in Eretz Yisrael is equal to all the commandments.”

An early, sweeping valuation of the Land as a spiritual axis.

Rishonim — Medieval Commentators
• Ramban teaches that mitzvot are fully binding only in Eretz Yisrael, and observed in exile merely to preserve them.
• Rambam (Beit HaBechirah 7:12) reiterates the Mishnah: “All of Eretz Yisrael is holier than all other lands.”

By the Middle Ages, the term is fully entrenched across halakhic, theological, and philosophical writing.

Bottom Line

“Eretz Yisrael” is not a modern, Zionist, or political invention. It is a halakhic and theological constant across 2,000+ years.

Choosing Our People

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In Chayei Sarah, Abraham does something brave. When it’s time to find a wife for his son Isaac, he refuses to choose from the neighbors around him. These were the people he did business with, lived among, interacted with every day — but they did not share his values. So he sends his servant far away to find someone who does.

Abraham teaches us something simple and powerful: proximity is not loyalty. Geography is not identity. Values matter more than convenience.

Rembrandt’s “The Jewish Bride,” (c. 1665) originally called “Isaac and Rebecca”

We are living this lesson now. In the last year, too many of us have watched people we assumed were “ours” turn their backs — classmates, coworkers, fellow Jews, even friends who share our politics. Being nearby doesn’t make someone trustworthy. Sharing a label doesn’t make them aligned. We’ve learned, painfully, that not everyone who sits next to us stands with us.

Abraham reminds us that it’s okay — even necessary — to choose our people carefully. To build relationships around courage and truth, not comfort or habit. To seek out the ones who show up for Jewish dignity when it’s hard, not only when it’s fashionable.

Isaac didn’t need a local partner; he needed the right partner. So do we.

From the Merit of the Righteous to the Merit of Evil

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Abraham once defended the wicked on the merit of the righteous few. Today, the world defends the wicked for the sake of evil masses.


The Moral Math of Vayera
In Parashat Vayera, God tells Abraham that Sodom will be destroyed for its depravity. The city is beyond saving — cruelty is civic policy, justice a mockery. But Abraham does the unthinkable: he defends the wicked, not because he excuses them, but because he believes that within their city a few righteous might remain.

“Will You indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked?”
(Genesis 18:23)

Abraham bargains God down — fifty, forty-five, thirty, twenty, ten. If even one percent (population of Sodom estimated 1,000) righteous can be found, the city deserves another chance. Abraham’s plea becomes the Torah’s first moral equation: mercy for the many on the merit of the few. He argues for the wicked because of the righteous – or perhaps for only the righteous to be spared.

Abraham praying to God on behalf of the residents of Sodom and Gomorrah, by Étienne Delaune (1518-1583)

A Sordid Defense of Evil
Four thousand years later, the moral logic has flipped. After the October 7 massacre — the torture, murder, and kidnapping of civilians — millions marched not to defend the righteous within Gaza, but to defend the wicked who carried out the atrocities. From London to New York, the cry was “Globalize the Intifada.” The United Nations would not even utter Hamas’s name.

They did not plead for ten good souls but glorified evil itself. Abraham argued for the guilty because he believed in goodness; today’s socialist-jihadists argue for the guilty because they despise Jews. That is not compassion — it is moral rot spreading far from the center of evil, infecting universities, newsrooms, and now city halls.

In Sodom’s time, no one defended depravity. Today, Genocide becomes “context.” Rape becomes “resistance.” Decapitation becomes “desperation.” Abraham fought for the 99 percent on the merit of the 1 percent righteous. Now we see millions fighting for the 75 percent wicked, based on the very actions of the depraved.

Nowhere is this clearer than in New York City — home to the world’s largest Jewish community — where activists chanting “Globalize the Intifada” and rape deniers will shape city politics. The descendants of Abraham are mocked as colonizers in their own synagogues and schools.

Swastikas, the symbol of the German National Socialist party of the 1930s and 1940s, painted on the Jewish Magen David School in Brooklyn, NY following the election of Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists

The Torah is silent on the punishment for those who aid and abet wickedness, but American law is not. The U.S. forbids “material support to terrorism.” Groups like CAIR face renewed scrutiny for Hamas ties; Students for Justice in Palestine has been banned from campuses for celebrating terror. Perhaps the law will finally catch up to those who glorify murder under the banner of justice.

Or New York City’s new mayor will bend and enforce the law to his own tune.

Abraham taught that one may plead for the wicked only on the merit of the righteous — never for the wicked in a moral void. The first is faith and mercy; the second, blasphemy and depravity. Today, we have lost the lesson, a moral stain on this generation.

Lech Lecha — The Courage to Stand Alone

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The first words God ever spoke to the first Jew were not of comfort, but command:

“Go forth from your country, from your birthplace, and from your father’s house, to the land that I will show you.”
(Genesis 12:1)

Abraham was told to leave everything that gave him safety — his home, his family, his people — and to walk alone to a foreign and unknown land.

That is the Jewish story. And it remains Israel’s story today.

Abraham Ortelius map “Journey of Abraham”, 1595

The Call to Walk Alone

Lech Lecha is more than a journey of geography; it is a test of courage. Abraham separated from a world that had lost its moral compass. He stood against the idols of his age.

Israel does the same now. The world pities the violent. It demands “restraint” from the victim and “understanding” for the murderer. Israel stands almost alone — mocked, pressured, condemned — for defending its people from those who glory in death.

Lech Lecha reminds us that holiness begins with separation. To follow conscience sometimes means turning your back on the crowd.

The Lonely Battle

When Abraham heard that his nephew Lot was taken captive, he didn’t wait for permission. He gathered a few hundred men and faced an army of kings. Outnumbered, he fought — and won.

That is Israel today. A small nation surrounded by hostile powers, fighting not for conquest but survival. Like Abraham, it refuses to wait for global approval before rescuing its own.

The Modern Lech Lecha

To stand alone is never easy. It is lonely, painful, and exhausting. But moral isolation is not failure — it is faith.

Abraham began our story by walking away from a world gone mad.
Israel continues it by standing firm in one.

Lech Lecha — Go forth. Fight on. Even if you walk alone.

Safeguarding Marriage

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In the Garden of Eden, God brought every creature before Adam to find him a mate. Yet “for Adam, no fitting helper was found.” Only then did God cast him into a deep sleep and create Eve from his side — not from the dust like the animals, but from within him. The relationship itself became sacred, a reflection of divine unity.

Ten generations later, when the world sank into corruption, Noah was told to gather the animals in pairs into the ark. Humanity, which had once never contemplated the holiness of distinctive companionship, was now preserved precisely through those who respected it. Adam searched for love among the animals; Noah safeguarded them. The story of creation evolved from seeking connection to sustaining it.

The Animals entering Noah’s Ark, Jacopo Bassano (1510–1592)

Our sages teach that “Hakadosh Baruch Hu moshiv yehidim baita” — the Holy One, blessed be He, makes returns single people to their homes [finds them a match] (Sotah 2a). The Talmud even imagines a heavenly voice proclaiming forty days before a child’s birth, “The daughter of so-and-so is destined for so-and-so.” God, as eternal matchmaker, continues the work He began in Eden — binding souls and sustaining worlds.

But if God is busy creating couples, perhaps mankind should be busy preserving them. Jewish life places enormous focus on shidduchim — helping singles find their match. Entire communities dedicate themselves to it, often lamenting the so-called “shidduch crisis.” Yet where is the equal effort for those already joined?

If marriages were more visibly nurtured — their holiness cherished, their struggles handled with care, their perseverance admired — perhaps the next generation would see marriage not as a fragile structure to fear, but as a sacred vessel worth building.

Maybe the remedy to the shidduch crisis is not exclusively with matchmaking, but with modeling. When society sees sanctification in marriage — not perfection, but devotion — it rekindles faith in the possibility of love itself. The story of Adam reminds us of the importance of a mate; the story of Noah teaches us to protect the bond once found. From creation to covenant, God builds the world through couples — and invites us to do the same.

May our generation learn to honor both halves of the divine equation — to help the lonely find their other, and to help the found remain together.